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Privatization In The Center And The Latin American Periphery, Melvin Burke

School of Economics Faculty Scholarship

"Privatization" is being promoted in this decade as the ultimate economic panacea. The latest "privatization craze" began in 1980 in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and has since spread throughout the industrialized nations of the world, such as France, Japan, the United States. More recently, the policy of privatization has been introduced in Mexico, Brazil, and other Third World countries. Billions of dollars of public assets have already been sold on the market to private investors and billions more of government tax revenues have been contracted out to private firms during this decade.

What precisely is this latest economic phenomenon sweeping …